1. Technical Field
One or more embodiments relate generally to an online social networking system. More specifically, one or more embodiments relate to providing social networking system users with targeted advertising.
2. Background and Relevant Art
A social networking system allows its users to connect to and communicate with other social networking system users. Each user may create a profile on a social networking system that corresponds to a user identity and may include information about each specific user, such as interests and demographic information. Because of the increasing popularity of social networking systems, as well as the increasing amount of user-specific information to which a social networking system has access, a social networking system may provide an ideal forum for advertisers to increase awareness about products or services.
Generally, advertisers may include third-party merchants (e.g., entities separate from the provider of a social network system). Many merchants provide merchant content (e.g., websites, applications) to promote and sell products and/or services outside of the social networking system. Merchants may desire to advertise to users within a social networking system to drive more user traffic to the merchant's content. For example, presenting advertisements to users within a social networking system can allow a merchant to gain increased public awareness for its products and/or services.
Conventionally, a merchant can track an individual user's activity with respect to the merchant's content (e.g., website, application), however, the merchant generally lacked any additional information about the user that would be helpful in advertising the merchant's products to the user, or to other potential customers, based on activity of an individual user. More often than not, a merchant's best opportunity to use an individual user's activity with respect to merchant content is send a follow-up communication to the individual user, assuming the merchant has an email address or physical address for the user. Therefore, the merchant's advertising activities are often inefficient, limited in nature, and lack accurate targeting to customers.
In contrast to an individual merchant, a social networking system can include a wealth of information associated with known specific users. Conventional merchant systems and social network systems, however, have no way of correlating user activity related to merchant content with a known user of a social networking system. Traditionally, therefore, the targeting accuracy of a merchant's advertising efforts within a social networking system is limited. For example, although targeted advertising is possible within the social networking system, the targeted advertising may be limited to only user information provided and collected within the social networking system itself. Therefore, conventional targeted advertisement efforts within social networking systems do not account for potentially large amounts of user activity that takes place outside the social networking system (e.g., user activity with respect a merchants' websites).
Accordingly, there are a number of disadvantages with conventional methods of providing targeted advertising to users of a social network.